Photograph by: Handout photos
, Postmedia News

This father-and-daughter team has produced a terrific step-by-step guide that tells you precisely what to do every week of the year, starting 20 weeks before the last frost date. It's an ideal way for a beginner to go through the year.

As well as good vegetable gardening tips, this contains 100 recipes featuring seasonal crops, so you can enjoy eating what you grow in creative ways as you go. Most important for beginners is that it contains to-do lists of what to do when.

Written to inspire you to create your own "miniature organic farm" regardless of space — in other words, even on a patio, balcony, rooftop, windowsill or planter box — this is a wonderfully enthusiastic guide to growing vegetables, as well as herbs, fruit and edible flowers. It approaches the subject by teaching you to understand the needs of each plant. Which makes perfect sense in all gardening if you want plants to be healthy and productive.

This comprehensive month-by-month guide to growing food organically comes from one who has done it for the past 30 years. Herriot looks at how to produce homegrown fruit and vegetables for the table every day of the year. It also looks at backyard poultry, seed saving and plant propagation.

5. Gourmet Garden by Virginia Hayes (Barrons, $23.99)

Superbly laid-out and illustrated, this is more like a video in your hands than a book. It guides you through each project with few words, but loads of instructive images.

6. The Gourmet Gardener by Bob Flowerdew (Kyle Cathie, $18.87)

You don't know Bob Flowerdew? No, say it ain't so. This is one of Britain's foremost food gardeners. You will have to get this from amazon.ca, as it is not published any more, but it is still a great book teeming with tips on how to grow food organically. It also tells you how to store and preserve it.

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